Final Essay II

Mandy McConnell
Dr. Gang Guo
POL 523
8 April 2009
Identifying Common Conceptual and Methodological
Difficulties: Regime type, Regime transition, and
Democratization in Comparative Politics
Like any other subdiscipline of comparative political science, there are many issues re-
lated to the study of regime type, regime transition, and democratization. The abundance
of quality and type of regime over many languages, regions, and eras makes it incredibly
difficult to systematically study these phenomena. This is true not just cross-nationally
but also domestically. We are often unable to pinpoint the exact causes of regime transi-
tions, cannot properly identify what type of regime the polity then becomes, and have a
fantastically difficult time agreeing on proper definitions of democracy and democratiza-
tion. It is even more taxing to compare non-democratic regimes. These polities have little
in common across nations other than the rote suppression of constituent rights. Even
this occurs at different levels and with different motivations. How will we ever be able to
capture such subjective, and often inaccessible, individual predilections and their impor-
tance to regime formation? Evidently, the study of both democracy and non-democracy
is equally tenuous.
Aside from failures to generally identify and quantify regime type, there is the im-
plicit recognition of trust as a main catalyst for the breakdown of autocracies and the
initiation and consolidation of democracy. However, the concepts of trust, or legitimacy,
are extremely abstract and though we may attempt to tackle them methodologically, we
will never reach a rm understanding of this psychological variable and its impact on
political outcomes. When so much of the literature relies on such an undefined concept,
it makes putting faith into the theories and explanations of regime scholars a bit harder
to swallow.
More specifically, operationalizing variables such as democracy or democratic con-
solidation usually requires a tradeoff. In order to be parsimonious we often must make
the arbitrary decision to set regime ff type as, for example, a continuous 3-6 point scale
variable. While this makes our models easier to handle it might not necessarily reflect
the real world; in reality there are many different variations of each regime type creating
a penumbra of various shades of political grey. However, it would also be a mistake to
endlessly quantify regimes { we would simply spin out of control never to meaningfully
test this variable again. A middle ground, if one can be appropriately identified, could
be the best for testing levels of regime type and democratization. Much of the current
literature attempts to discover such a place and hopefully we are getting closer.
After examining Samuel Huntington's widely accepted work on the 'third wave' of
democratization it is diffcult to argue that his theories are less than well thought out.
But it becomes clear that while attempting to explain the different eras of democratic
conversion we have so many different possible causes that we can find no tangible an-
swers. A mix of both endogenous and exogenous factors probably cause democratization
but these factors differ not only between countries but within. Take, for example, the list
of possible contributors to democratization on pages 37-38 (Huntington 1991). Then take
a moment to mull over Huntington's immediately following statement, "The theories re-
lating these factors to democracy and democratization are almost always plausible. Each
variable and theory, however, is likely to have relevance to only a few cases" (1991:38).
Great. So is democratization a generalizable phenomenon or would it serve us well to
move away from the quantitative research and back toward qualitative area studies? Are
there an innite number of causes that can only be explained in one country at a time?
If the work of Huntington confronts such issues, it is safe to say that the work of many
other researchers echoes the same sentiment. Yes, democratization is a diffcult depen-
dent variable to study. Perhaps it is a great example of a subdiscipline that would largely
benefit from a combination of empirical and qualitative work.
Huntington's lengthy discussion of declining authoritarian legitimacy is another area
that may benefit from such a fusion. His opening line to this section, if rather discour-
aging, reads, "legitimacy is a mushy concept that political analysts do well to avoid"
(Huntington, 1991:46). If, as this section goes on to detail, legitimacy is so important to
understanding shifts from autocracy to democracy, is regionally different, and declines
naturally over time how in the world can we model such a thing? Though Huntington
provides extensive qualitative work on the issue, quite convincingly I would argue, there
is a lack of empirical evidence. Again, our field today is one of quantitative work. Is
democratization going to be relegated to the world of the case studies forever?
The inclusion of economic development, while significant in most studies of regime
transition, is a prime example of a concept that is difficult to compare cross-nationally.
While modernization theories became the dominant explanations for democratization
in the mid-twentieth century, we are discovering today that these explanations do not
always hold empirically. Instead, the unique patterns of industrialization, wealth, levels of
taxation, education, and growth rates are all interrelated and heavily impact a country's
democratic path. Again, however, these unique patterns are specic to only one or a few
cases (Huntington 1991). Rather than economic development (traditionally a measure of
GDP per capita) focused on as the causal factor for democratization, it is here described
as leading to other social goods (such as education, literacy, etc) that then work in tandem
to produce democratization (Huntington 1991:106).
Along with the unruly nature of democratization, in this work the author chooses
to define democracy on the basis of elections as opposed to some of the other widely
accepted specifications of democracies as attitudes, civic structures, and institutions. This
definition of democracy is a minimal one (Huntington 1991). However, for Huntington it
is so defined because it allows us the opposite view of non-democratic systems: all of the
electoral hallmarks of democracy are absent in autocracy. It is as simple as that. Where
we often have diffculty pinpointing non-democratic regimes for comparison, Huntington
works to show us that a simplification of democracy may work to allow for an equally
simple view of autocracy. But things quickly become more complicated as we must
differentiate between democratization and liberalization. How can you tell these two
phenomenon apart? Will they look the same in all countries? Next we must make the
distinction between democracy and stability. Again, how do we measure these things
across borders? Lastly, do we treat our regime types as dichotomous or continuous
variables? What about democratically elected leaders who don't actually hold any power
and are instead installations of another group (Huntington 1991:11)? These are just a few
examples of the many problems that arise when defining democracy and democratization.
Huntington goes on to show us just how complicated questions of the concepts of
democratization can be, without even addressing the methodological side of the puzzle.
As you can imagine, operationalizing these concepts and modeling them in a way that
accounts for changes over time, the often dichotomous nature of the dependent variable,
the likely country-group similarities, and the possible multicollinearity of such intertwined
observations is quite a difficult task. Let's turn to a discussion of the Przerowski et al.
paper that faces just such methodological conundrums.
This is another paper that shows us how complex the relationships between democra-
tization and its causal factors can be. The authors nd that several independent variables
bear weight in explaining democratic endurance but they do so dependent upon different
levels of each other. In other words, there are mediating and often collinear relationships
between the variables. Like Huntington, Przerowski et al. nd that international (ex-
ogenous) factors are important to democratic endurance. For example, if there are more
democracies in any one particular year, fledgling democracies are more likely to survive
(Przerowski et al., 1996:3). This is directly related to Huntington's diffusion hypothesis;
if the countries around you are democratic then you probably are too. This is one of
the easiest hypotheses to measure and should have broader implications for the demo-
cratic peace. The authors also find that the institutions of a nation are very important
for democratic endurance. In other words, Przerowski et al. find that democracies are
more likely to succeed in countries with parliamentary rather than presidential systems.
This is especially interesting, as countries who have previously had military regimes are
more likely to adopt presidential structures (Przerowski et al., 1996:6). But this is a time
bound discovery,
Countries in which monarchy was abolished (France in 1848 and again in 1875, Ger-
many in 1919) and colonies that rebeled against monarchical powers (the United
States and Latin America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries)
replaced monarchs with presidents. Countries that emerged from colonial domina-
tion after the Second World War typically inherited parliamentarianism from the
colonizers" (Przerowski et al., 1996:6).
With Huntington we are able to differentiate between three distinct, time dependent
waves of democratization. With Przerowski et al., we see that time affects the types of
institutions a nation chooses as well as the levels of economic development in a nation.
These factors help to explain democratic endurance. But this begs the question: will
democratization and democratic endurance look the same for nations in the future or
are we relegated to studying retrospective cases? This question is not unique to this
particular sub-discipline and speaks to the overall generalizability of our theories.
As another point, the concepts that are intrinsically linked to the authors' findings
are difficult to pinpoint. They point to a pattern of political learning as the basis for
structural choices: countries may see that parliamentary systems work best for retaining
democracy but they still choose presidential institutions because of past experiences and
legacies. This is quite interesting but I'm afraid that it is very difficult to parallel in-
stitutional endurance to democratic endurance without more formalized models. When
the authors state that, "countries that adopt presidential institutions when they transit
to democracy are stuck with them" (Przerowski et al., 1996:7) they are doing so based
on an examination of only two countries' experiences. This is a very bold and a very
broad statement. Despite their statistically significant models I am inclined to think that
this is an area where a larger n is required to make any law-like allegations. In sum, the
conclusion that economically developed countries who adopt parliamentary systems are
the most likely to see enduring democracy is an interesting mix of modernization and
democratization theories. But without a larger sample of countries to test, I hesitate to
apply of these findings cross-nationally.
The Epstein et al. paper (2006) is a direct response to Pzerowski et al.'s claims in
the abovementioned work. Specifically, the authors reference PACL's work stating,
an increase in per capita GDP-is not a causal factor in the process of democratiza-
tion. Rather, they argue, the positive association between income and democracy
results from the reduced likelihood of more modern countries sliding back, as it were,
into undemocratic forms of government once having (randomly) become democratic
(Epstein et al, 2006:441).
The authors reject this wisdom on the grounds that the previous findings were based on a
simple dichotomous dependent variable. Here, however, the authors extend the category
of regime by including 'partial democracy' in their models. Will this make a difference
in the findings? Will the modernization theory still be rejected based on this new regime
classiffication? If so, it teaches an important lesson to the field. A closer and more
thorough examination of our dependent variables may lead to better operationalization.
The authors employ the complicated methods of PACL including the newly classified
regime measures. One question drives them; they want to know what makes countries
democratic and what keeps them that way.
While this is an exciting edition to the literature, the issue of identifying partial
democracies is also a difficult one. Deciding only to include a third measure and not a
fourth or fifth may have further implications. When disaggregating regime type, there is
necessarily some arbitrary assignment of the range of polity scores given to this middle
classication. The Polity IV data set is employed (-10 to +10 point scale) and the partial
regime category is defined as those polities with scores ranging from +1 to +7. Though
this is entirely reasonable, it is also safe to say that another group of researchers may
nd it pertinent to measure partial democracies from -1 to +6, or some other some
change of range, thereby altering the results entirely. This is a common issue for political
economy and as we saw with the discussion of both Huntington and Przerworski. It can
be corrected but that will only come as a result of a large, common body of knowledge
with standardized measures. Unfortunately, we are not there yet.
Wisely, Epstein et al. also consider the historical legacies of democratizing nations
by using a measure of previous democratization. Two other independent variables are
employed in an attempt to make the model as full as possible. These include a log of
trade openness, and another variable capturing the "resource curse" hypothesis (which
argues that "countries deriving a large share of national income from easily extractable
natural resources tend to be undemocratic and unstable) (Epstein et al., 2006:557). The
authors run a number of difficult statistical models including tobit analyses, hazard mod-
els, duration models and Markov regressions. The results report that PACL initially
misinterpreted the standard errors of their Markov model, leading them to report the
impact of GDP on democratization as insignificant (Epstein et al., 2006:566). The intro-
duction of the partial democracy measure helped highlight this mistake and the authors
believe the inclusion of such a variable should become a standard in the field (Epstein
et al., 2006:566). This work should highlight how difficult it is to model the complex
concepts of regime and democratization. The amount of work done to simply reappraise
one particular element of an author's argument is overwhelming. And, unfortunately,
no one but the individual researcher and his or her research design/data are available to
back up the findings.
So far what we have seen is a mixture of both complementary and contrasting theories
and data. Author Barbara Geddes seeks to rectify some of the deepest contradictions
that exist between theoretical approaches to regime type and transition. With Huntington
fresh on our minds, it is interesting to note that, " since 1974, identified by Huntington
(1991) as the beginning of the "third wave" of democratization, 85 authoritarian regimes
have ended" (Geddes, 1999:115). Obviously, then, it is still difficult for us to make
generalizations about the processes of democratization and democratic endurance. This
is mostly our inability to capture inter-regional differences in the actual processes of
democratization (Geddes, 1991: 117). What can we do to x this problem?
Geddes attempts to rectify this by providing systematic explanations for the differences between types of authoritarianism. We have attempted to classify dierent demo-
cratic systems at great length but have neglected defining authoritarian regimes because
of the conceptual difficulty inherent in doing so. She classifies each regime as personalist,
military, single-party, or amalgams of the pure types (Geddes, 1991:121). Though it is
another positive step to even try and disaggregate authoritarianism into individual regime
characteristics, it also may be bit arbitrary. Other intermediary classes of authoritarian-
ism arguably exist. Making disctinctions is necessary in order to maintain parsimony but
we may be making that model vs. real-life tradeoff. It is not necessarily undersirable to
do so; the alternative may be the inability to statistically examine real-world phenomena.
That certainly wouldn't get us anywhere.
In response, Geddes addresses these classification issues by emphasizing control over
access to power and influence rather than by formal institutional characteristics (Geddes,1991:123). This is an excellent decision as it captures the more nuanced elements of
individual regimes rather than the often rigid structures we use for cross national com-
parisons. And although she must adopt traditional assumptions regarding the nature of
power (i.e. leaders want to maintain power and they will please constituents in order to
do so), she tweaks them to t the unique perspective of autocrats. This mostly includes
the latter assumption; we must empirically analyze the different levels of support needed
by dierent autocratic regime types because there does not exist an across the board need
to pay attention to constituents' demands (Geddes, 1991:125). Perhaps sometimes leav-
ing institutional explanations for ones that better capture the psychological tendencies
of executives is a useful change.
Through a thorough examination of both game theoretic and regression analyses,
Geddes is able to conclude that "strong evidence supports the argument that economic
development increases the likelihood of democratic politics. Available evidence also sup-
ports the claim that authoritarian regimes are more likely to break down during economic
crisis, though some forms of authoritarianism are more susceptible to economic down-
turns than other" (Geddes, 1991:140). Her work helps us understand the different paths
democratic transitions may take in light of the specific nature of their authoritarian lega-
cies. The concepts and methodological issues, though existent, are addressed in ways
that give us hope. We needn't believe that the contradictory theories of our field can
never be rectified.
Regardless of the difficulties comparative political scientists face, the field is of ex-
treme importance and must continue to be pursued in earnest. Each of these authors
has contributed a great deal of insight into his or her eld and serve as solid examples
of the benefits of continued scholarly dialogue. Identifying what triggers the switch to
democracy as well as what will make democracy last may lead to a more peaceful and
verdant world. In order to do this, we must find a field wide standard for defining our
concepts. This may be possible if we continue to collaborate and empirically explore
regime transitions and democratization. The qualitative elements of the field are ex-
tremely important as they are able to capture the deep historical, sociological, and often
psychological underpinnings of our outcomes. Questions of trust may be answered by in-
cluding tenets of the broad literature on the subject found more generally in comparative
politics. Drawing on the methods this sub-field has learned to employ, we may be able to
better incorporate measures of legitimacy into comparative political models and thereby
increase their explanatory power. In sum, the theoretical development of regime, regime
type, and democratization has advanced greatly since the 1950s and 1960s. However, if
we would ultimately like to come to conclusions that are law-like and irrefutable we must
keep pushing forward; political science has not yet reached the same scientic standards
found in the hard sciences. Yet no matter what the issue, it can be resolved. We must
have faith that work in this area will lead us to a better understanding of the world
around us.

References
Epstein, David L., Robert Bates, Jack Goldstone, Ida Kristensen, and
Sharyn O'Halloran. 2006. "Democratic Transitions." Midwest Political
Science Association, Vol. 50, No. 3, Pp. 551-569.
Geddes, Barbara. 1999. "What Do We Know About Democratization
After Twenty Years?" Annual Review of Political Science, 2:115-144.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. The Third Wave: Democratization in the
Late Twentieth Century. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
(chapters 1& 2:1-108)
Przeworski, Adam, Michael Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub, and
Fernando Limongi. "What Makes Democracies Endure?" Journal of
Democracy. 7:39-55.
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